Dear list members,
I've been exploring a bit the possibilities of PostGIS, and accessing
its functionality (the GEOS geometry library really) from R. I used
writeOGR and readOGR from rgdal to move sp objects in and out the data
base, and used sqlQuery from RODBC to do a spatial query on the data
base. Preliminary results can be found on
http://wiki.intamap.org/index.php/PostGIS
The next step could be to wrap these kind of steps in functions that
hide the fact that there's an RDBMS and some SQL involved. The full set
of OpenGIS functions
(http://postgis.refractions.net/docs/ch06.html#id2852098
) and PostGIS
extensions is, however, rather large, and installing PostgreSQL+PostGIS
besides R is straightforward, but has some overhead too -- I guess we
can't wrap that in an install.package("rpostgis") call.
I welcome any suggestions or discussion.
--
Edzer